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06 mayo, 2013

US: Obama In Mexico Gives Cartels Short Shrift – Investors.com

President
Obama is winning cheers in Mexico this week on the feel-good issues of
trade and immigration. Unaddressed is a more urgent issue — Mexico’s
lack of coop eration with the U.S. in its war on cartels.
This deserves far greater attention than it’s getting, given that
Mexico, beneath the happy handshakes, is pretty much kicking critical
U.S. forces out of the country.

According to a report in Sunday’s New York Times, Mexico has stopped
sending its high-ranking officers to the U.S. to be polygraphed, a key
way to weed out corrupted officials from high office.
It’s also thrown out U.S security officials from a major intelligence
center in Monterrey, where they had worked side by side with Mexican
officials to analyze tips on cartel activity. Now the data won’t be
shared.
Drones flown over cartel-kingpin hideouts in the Mexican badlands have also been scrapped.
U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
investigators also were evicted from an investigation into a major gas
explosion at the Pemex state oil company headquarters in Mexico City
last January, after they asked to probe whether the inferno may have
been caused by a bomb.
If Mexico’s war were won, it would be no problem, the U.S. would be
as happy to leave as the Mexicans would be to see the U.S. go. But the
war hasn’t been won not by a long shot. In fact, there is evidence it
may be getting worse.
Killings average about 50 a day and the death toll is approaching
100,000. The private intelligence forecasting firm Stratfor reports that
in the northern Chihuahua state, a surge in violence is afflicting its
central region as the Los Zetas-linked La Linea gang shoots it out with
the Sinaloa Cartel.
There have been new grotesque cartel killings in Veracruz and
Acapulco, including one incident where several headless bodies were
placed on plastic chairs in a public place.
Such problems won’t go away by ignoring them.
Yet Enrique Pena Nieto, who was elected by a war-weary Mexican public
apparently to just make the cartel war go away — and whose party is
widely known for appeasing rather than destroying drug cartels — seems
to be prioritizing headline control instead of criminal control as his
means of dealing with the issue.
All this calls for U.S. leadership. But the U.S. president is going
right along with the ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away approach, leading
again from behind.